In the age of bricks and mortar, one organization might have been able to provide every standard that a given industry needed. But with ICT convergence, it takes a "village" of organizations to do the job. Of course, not everyone in a village always gets along.

What do you call an accredited SDO that gives its standards away, creates standards for everything from stable paper for perpetual archiving to client/server service and protocol standards for information retrieval? Oh, and they also butt heads with the IETF over the namespace identifiers. You call it "NISO".

FTC Complaint Counsel has filed a brief appealing the Administrative Law Judge's decision In the Matter of Rambus that was almost as thick as the ALJ's own exhaustive opinion. Weighty briefs were filed by three groups of "friends of the court" as well. The Commissioners have some reading to do.

Standards take many forms. One is the verbal standard, often providing a historical reference point. Many people are arguing today over whether Iraq is "another Vietnam". What exactly does "another Vietnam" mean, and does the Iraq situation meet that standard?